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Art is a form of consciousness.

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Consciousness
Art
Form

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
Susan Sontag
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
Susan Sontag
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
Susan Sontag
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
Susan Sontag
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
Susan Sontag
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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
Susan Sontag
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
Susan Sontag
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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
Susan Sontag
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I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
Susan Sontag
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
Susan Sontag
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
Susan Sontag
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Susan Sontag
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
Susan Sontag
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
Susan Sontag
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag